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FWi launches Tahiti upgrades to CMS for digital signage, kiosks

Dec. 20, 2012

Digital signage company Four Winds Interactive announced the availability of Tahiti, version 4.5 of the company's software platform for creating and managing content across digital signage, interactive kiosks, mobile devices and more.

Highlights of the new features in Tahiti include major graphical enhancements such as transitions, effects, animations and layering; improved accessibility through text-to-speech; and support for modern user interactions like swiping and pinching.

"We started working on Tahiti more than 18 months ago and we're all very excited about the results," said David Levin, president and CEO of FWi. "By re-architecting our player software, we were able to achieve stunning improvements in visual presentation without sacrificing any of the flexibility our customers love. We worked new functionality like gesturing into existing features such as Live Data and the results provide an unparalleled user experience. Combined with major enhancements around our Cloud back-end, Tahiti represents a huge leap forward in our product's capability."

With the Tahiti rollout, FWi said it provides more robust and dynamic aesthetic capabilities directly within the software. FWi users can now incorporate a variety of visual effects to their communications, including a diverse selection of text effects; rounded region corners and drop shadows; Open Type Fonts; more than 40 transitions between templates, regions and content items; and video layering.

Digital signs and kiosks can now offer improved accessibility for those with visual impairment or reading difficulties using text-to-speech, FWi said. Users can configure settings such as pronunciation, pitch, volume and more to their liking and as each setting or audience requires. For touchscreens, Tahiti supports modern interactions and gesturing that most end-users have become familiar with through the rise of smartphones and tablets, including horizontal and vertical swiping, pinching to zoom and more.

Multiple signs playing video content can now be synchronized without overtaxing your network. Users can arrange signs together in a video wall or panorama to create a seamless moving picture, or group displays near each other in the same space. By synchronizing video (and optionally, audio) content, users can create large-scale, coordinated advertising or entertainment experiences.

"In the past few years, hardware capabilities have increased tremendously, and so have users' expectations of what a screen can do," said Dave Shapiro, CTO, FWi. "Taking advantage of the latest graphics technologies required significant changes to the architecture of our software. Major revisions are always a little scary, but they also give you a chance to improve on past decisions and produce a design that will be more viable in the long term."